Make: Volume 91

A

s a kid, I became fascinated with electronic

music when I noticed how much it pissed off

my parents.

My childhood (in the early aughts) was a weird

time for popular music. The radio was dominated

by aggressive bro-metal and boy bands that

sounded like the sonic equivalent of processed

cheese. Pop culture was as bland as it gets, but

once in a blue moon the radio would play an

instrument so colorful and alien that my child-

brain would struggle to imagine the thing that

produced it. Again and again, the answer would

be accompanied by an arm wave and the word

synthesizer.

You see, until incredibly recently, synthesizers

were seen as incredibly ...